Ebook The Art of Translating

Our teaching of a foreign tongue is apt to be too mechanical. The student must be made to feel that the language he is study ing is not something strange and mysterious, but natural and simple. This he cannot do until he changes his position and looks at the unfolding of the thought from the standpoint of the original. It is then, and not till then, that he really reaches the heart of his Latin or Greek, his French or German. It is then that he is prepared to enter upon what is as much an art as that of the sculptor, of the painter, of the designer I mean the art of reproducing into living English his appreciation of all that the original has brought to him.